May 2, 2005

Christina Hoff Sommers describes the College Republicans' response to the overpromotion of "The Vagina Monologues" at Roger Williams University and the predictably repressive/humorless response from the admininstration. Read the whole piece (in the National Review), but here's a funny excerpt:

The week before V-Day, the Roger Williams campus was plastered with flyers emblazoned with slogans such as “My Vagina is Flirty” and “My Vagina is Huggable.” There was a widely publicized “orgasm workshop.” On the day of the play, the V-warriors sold lollipops in the in the shape of–-guess what? Last year, the student union was flooded with questionnaires asking unsuspecting students questions like “What does your Vagina smell like?” None of this offended the administration or elicited any reprimands, probations, or confiscations.

The campus conservatives artfully (in the college sense of "artful") mimicked the V-Day campaign. They papered the school with flyers that said, “My penis is majestic” and “My penis is hilarious.” The caption on one handout read, “My Penis is studious.” It showed Testaclese [the P-Day penis-shaped mascot] reclining on a couch reading Michael Barone’s Hard America, Soft America....

It is easy to understand why school officials would not want a six-foot phallus wandering around campus; nor why they would ask students not to paper the college with posters describing all the things it likes to do. But that is just the sort of thing the vagina warriors have been doing, year after year, on hundreds of campuses.

Very funny! Seems to me the university shouldn't be engaging in viewpoint discrimination. There should be vagina/penis parity. Quite aside from all of this, why isn't everyone tired of "The Vagina Monologues" by now? It was always a bad play.

3 comments:

I think that Be at Bebere has it right in explaining the enduring popularity of the play.

When I was a kid, a production of 'Damn Yankees' was presented on network TV. I felt so grown up in being able to tell my friends and family that I was going to watch 'Damn Yankees,' enjoy 'Damn Yankees,' absorb 'Damn Yankees,' sing along with 'Damn Yankees,' and review 'Damn Yankees' that after mentioning the play for the 437th. that day, my folks turned off 'Damn Yankees' and sent me to bed.

The sense that one is doing some things, such as viewing a play the title of which others might find offensive, can make them appealing, no matter what their actual merits.

Hah. Are you a law & econ prof? I ask because questions concerning pareto efficiency and the point at which supply meets demand, often, um, arise when discussing this particular supply/demand curve.

Most people would argue that they have plenty of one, yet can't get enough of the other. And for a small but persistent group of marginal consumers, they have an ample supply of one, yet want still more of it, while desiring none of the other - a situation that vexes supply-siders. Still other people find that although supply has met demand on a microeconomic scale, they'd rather find a different supplier, perhaps one with more vertical integration, or less horizontal distribution, to meet ever-evolving demands. This lack of parity between the supply and demand in turn causes great distress.

But then any good economist will tell you that even if you achieve Pareto efficiency, it doesn't mean the distribution is equitable, or that all the consumers and suppliers are happy. Perhaps we need to form a government agency to study the problem...